Current Projects

Edited Collection: Contested Expertise, Toxic EnvironmentsThis is a collaborative project with Janet Brodie at Claremont Graduate University and Brinda Sarathy at Pitzer College which came out of a 2-day workshop in Claremont in September 2015. At that meeting, participants read and commented on a wide range of papers examining the often controversial roles of scientific and technical experts in responding to and making sense of toxic environments. Authors are now revising these papers and we will be submitting a full manuscript to University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2016. My own contribution is a chapter looking at the work of Lauriston Sale Taylor, an American physicist who helped set the first standards for x-ray and radium protection in the United States.

Book Manuscript: Physics and the formation of RadiologyWith the discovery of x-rays in 1895, doctors and physicists became fascinated by the same phenomenon. Doctors quickly began using x-rays to produce pictures of previously hidden parts of the body, and physicists worked to understand the properties of this new emanation in the aether. Their work did not, however, remain entirely separate. Doctors and physicists were members of the same x-ray societies, and served on committees together to determine safety and measurement standards. In this book, I trace the dynamics of this collaboration, arguing that over the first decades of the 20th century, doctors increasingly deferred to the values and judgements of their colleagues in physics.

Physics in the NewsIn this project, I am exploring the cultural life of physics through newspapers. With digital archives we can now pull up and count every single instance of the word "physics" or "chemistry" published in a particular newspaper in a given year. In 1880, for instance, 59 separate articles in the New York Times mentioned the word "physics." By 1930, this number had climbed to 401. While the vast majority of these articles do not describe new discoveries or research, they do provide a fantastic opportunity to begin to map the connotations and expectations conjured by the word "physics," providing insight into how and why physics came to command such cultural authority in the early 20th century.